The Mine is pleased to present Italian artist Giovanni Leonardo Bassan in a second solo show, a pop-up exhibition in Paris where the artist is currently based.

Inspired by a two-month visit to a brand new metropolis, this exciting young artist experiences the ‘big city’ as a form of abstract meditation. In his eyes, the city becomes an encounter, a muse, a maker, and a benevolent machine. As the artist walks and breathes its days and nights, he is invited to surrender his sense of self, to hover over histories, to suspend his thoughts, to fight his fears and to find new joys in its trembling streets.

Tired of the violence infecting our existence, the artist finds that in the city his ideas no longer operate in a void. His sensitivity to his surroundings becomes fully present. He admires the city’s boundless energy and documents its faulty realities. He falls in love with the electricity of being. He understands the complexities of his own freedom. He sees the darkness but embraces the light.

Driven by this current, the artist has responded in a new series of small format works. Temporal collages are formed through paintings, pencil drawings and resins, using improvisational techniques influenced by the graffiti and spontaneous imagery of the streets, and shown alongside two pieces of photographic work. Each image is a search for its own fleeting life. The artist rejects the city’s distractions to find a deeper urgency. ‘By improvising I learn that contradictions are the clearest way to speak,’ the artist says. ‘Getting distracted by so many stimulations, and mostly by myself, I try to be here, right now.’